Not-So-Special Effects : FLICKER, <i> By Theodore Roszak (Summit Books: $19.95; 544 pp.)</i>

“Flicker” starts with genuine promise. The author’s voice recalls the impact of movie on a child’s sensibility: “I see it as a softly focused square of light, and see myself dazzled and aroused, seated in the embracing darkness, savoring the enticement.” The writing is warm and enchanted, but alert and original. Movie is called “a thin broth of illusion smeared across perishing plastic.” The reader gets ready for something wonderful.

And yet . . . it has never been too tough a trick in the movies to grab our attention at the start. The sudden surge of light in darkness is as potent as a mugger or a stranger with a story. Holding on, and convincing us that the first rough seizure was justified--that has always been less common. “Flicker” is not a movie, of course, but its effectiveness is only as brief as that of a movie, and there is time--far too much time--to measure the gap between Roszak the novelist and the arresting flare of his ideas.

The book’s narrator, Jonathan Gates, goes from being a kid in love with trashy movies to a film professor at UCLA. He was born in 1939 to a mother who haunted theaters to avoid landlords looking for the rent. Jonathan imagines that the cries of Tarzan or the Wolf Man “may have infiltrated my fetal sleep” as his mother sat in the dark.

By the late 1950s, Gates begins his education (sentimental as well as filmic) at the hands of Clare Swann, an earthy, brilliant, belligerent cineaste who co-owns a basement theater in Los Angeles for which she writes passionate program notes. She will become Clarissa Swann, film critic for the New York Times.

Despite Roszak’s gestures toward distancing (Clare is a big fan of Orson Welles, and she sometimes fills in at The New Yorker when Pauline Kael is away), most readers will enjoy “Flicker’s” fond portrait of Kael herself--or if not the Pauline, the leading Paulette.

Clare is the most plausible and interesting character in the book, which makes it harder to understand why she feels love or respect for the unchangingly callow and closed Gates. Late on in “Flicker,” Gates admits that he seems “to have gone from naive youth to naive middle age with remarkably little character development along the way.” In life that may be a sorrowful predicament; in a novel it is ruin.

Before this glum truth about Gates settles in, he has become fascinated by the legend of Max Castle, or Kastell, a German director, reared in classic Expressionism, who came to America, made cheap horror pictures, worked with Welles on “Heart of Darkness,” a project Orson dreamed of before “Citizen Kane,” and gave an assist to John Huston on “The Maltese Falcon.” Castle was lost at sea in 1941.

He is an appealing phantom, with a bit of Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre, and a lot of Edgar G. Ulmer and movie cliche to hold him together. Jonathan’s hunt for Castle’s lost film is entertaining, even if Roszak’s writing cannot make the movies seem worth the search. But the novel comes into its most vivid life when Jonathan encounters Castle’s frequent cameraman, Zip Lipsky, a fast-talking dwarf, and Mrs. Zip (who once was Nylana the Jungle Girl, serial goddess in a boy’s best erotic dreams).

There is much more. Clare warns Jonathan that Castle’s dark mastery seems sinister. When he watches the films he feels unclean; another viewer murmurs that they are enough to put you off sex for life.

In the very prolonged, very disappointing second half of the novel, Jonathan discovers that Castle was part of a heretical cult determined to do dirt on movies, the sexual urge and all of life. We are talking major end-of-the-world conspiracy such as obsessed Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. But the Mabuse films moved like impatient electricity.

“Flicker” supposes that Castle and his movement (the Orphans) developed a series of special effects. After this long, repetitive book, I am still not clear how they work, but they involve split lighting, the superimposition of subliminal images and negative etching in the most noir areas of the frame--not exactly the devilish resources most available to the budgets and schedules by which Castle worked.

The scale of “Flicker” suggests that Roszak (a history professor and the author of earnest studies on the media) means us to be solemn about this hocus-pocus. And perhaps we might be, if he could convey the horror simply, directly and with fear instead of tedium. But as “Flicker” turns to the Templars and the Albigensians, its hokeyness becomes distended and intolerable. The novel is desperate for editing; the writing goes dead and monotonous; the structure is slow-footed.

The idea remains provocative. There are film makers as well as movie buffs who know secretly the betrayal in their obsession. But the threat in movies is everyday and undirected--far more frightening than the malign plans of wicked cults written for Vincent Price.

This menace has to do with living too much in the dark, ruling out too much of the rest of life and yielding to the movies’ most treacherous gift: that of indulged but alienating fantasy. If only Roszak had had the wit, the talent and the discipline to show how Clare and Jonathan find the dismay and disenchantment in what once was love and vocation.

“Flicker” refuses the chance of that modest, ordinary tragedy. Instead, it goes for Monogram dread, but only mimics the dreadful movies that have kept Jonathan from growing up.